If I Could Tell You I Would Let You Know
by samurai frasier crane
Summary: Here's a missing scene from "Fortune and Men's Weight" attempting to explain how our favorite doomed lovebirds reconciled in its aftermath. Title is from a REALLY GREAT POEM by W.H. Auden which you should read instead of this story, because it will give you chills and make you weep inconsolably. But then come back and read this story so I don't feel lonely.
1. Chapter 1

Notes: I found this swell poem last night and was like SHIT I HAVE TO WRITE CHEERS FANFIC BASED ON IT! I meant to finish it today but first I had to work and now I have to go eat sushi, so I decided I'll wrap it up tomorrow. Sorry for the somewhat abrupt ending of this chapter but the sushi is just calling me. It is so close but so far away, by which I mean I have to walk to my friend's house to get it. That being said…

_There are no fortunes to be told, although,_

_Because I love you more than I can say,_

_If I could tell you I would let you know._

_The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,_

_There must be reasons why the leaves decay;_

_Time will say nothing but I told you so._

- from "If I Could Tell You", W.H. Auden

After reading the fortune they stood in silence for a long moment, and once again Diane found herself spooked by the machine. There was something unnatural about the calm that had settled over them; she felt almost paralyzed by it, unable to walk away or even look away. The longer she listened the more it scared her – where had the _sounds_ gone? The street, she guessed, was completely deserted. It seemed even the wind had lost the energy to blow.

She gave a start when he moved, almost imperceptibly at first: folding the fortune in half and slipping it into his coat pocket. When he started towards the bar, his footsteps broke the trance and finally she looked at him – recalling, unexpectedly and with some alarm, something her father had told her once: "There is no one in the world so loathsome," he'd said, "that someone won't find a way to love them anyway."

At the time and still, she could not tell if the words comforted or scared her. Often she'd wondered to whom he was referring, without being able to help herself because she really didn't want to know. Now, she thought, feeling as if she were sinking into quicksand, she wanted to know even less.

Sam opened the cash register and began arranging the night's receipts on the bar.

"What…?" she managed. "What are you _doing?_"

"What are _you_ doing?" he said – coldly, and without looking up. "I don't pay you to sit around reading all day, you know."

She gaped at him, taking a step towards the bar herself. "Sam!"

He ignored her.

"Sam, are you just going to pretend that—"

"Will you shut up?" he snapped. "Some people don't do math so good when someone else is blathering in their ear."

"But we were just in the middle of—"

"We weren't in the middle of anything."

She had no idea what he meant by this – whether he was reaffirming their breakup or denying that it had happened at all. He kept his eyes fixed on the receipts, chewing on his bottom lip as he added the totals. Finally he said (still not looking up), "What are you standing there for?" The question startled her, because she didn't know. It was a strange thing; she'd felt such conviction only minutes before, but something had happened to it and now she was just confused. Not conflicted but _confused_, in the terrible, headache-inducing way she'd experienced in grade school when her mother gave her _Being and Nothingness_. For weeks she'd sat on the playground alone, staring hopelessly at the words and praying that they might eventually start to make some sense.

"Do you… Should I…?"

She was trying to ask him if she should go and was almost relieved that she couldn't manage to get the words out – because why should she _ask_ him? She wanted her courage back; she wanted to walk out the door and never return, or rather, she _wanted_ to want that. Instead she remained rooted in place, thinking dully to herself that it really was like quicksand.

Here was the trouble: it seemed the worse things got, the more detestable he proved himself to be, the less she could deny to herself that she loved him. It made about as much sense as _Being and Nothingness _had when she was ten, and as with _Being and Nothingness_ she'd begun with a methodical approach. She tried to remember when she had started to love him, thinking that if she could quantify it in some way, determine the exact moment, she might be able to work backwards from there and figure out what to do. She thought it might also help if she could figure out _why_ she loved him, but that was an even more impossible question and she'd given up on it a long time ago. All she knew was that she did, and that it terrified her.

No matter how long she dwelled on it, the _when_ proved as elusive as the _why_. The memories stayed muddled and vague in her mind – not the details or events, which were still sharp and vivid as ever, but the feelings. She couldn't come up with any words for them, and so there'd be no working backwards, no way out. No sense. Her lips twisted into smirk as she thought of the phrase "falling in love." It wasn't true; there had been no single moment in which she'd thrown herself off a cliff and crashed to the bottom somehow changed. Meeting him had been exactly like stepping into quicksand, and the question was not so much when it had happened but how deep she was now and if there was any hope of getting out.

"Hey!"

His voice jarred her from her reverie and she looked up abruptly.

"You're still on the clock, you know. Get over here."

Was avoidance his default mode? She gaped at him, completely stymied. "Sam, I can't…" The words died in her throat when their eyes met. She couldn't what – work there anymore? Yes, that was what needed to be said. If she could manage, miraculously, to extract herself from quicksand, it wouldn't make much sense to keep standing there instead of looking for more solid ground. It occurred to her suddenly that he knew this too, and that his unblinking gaze was a challenge. She took another step towards the bar, wondering what he was going to do and hoping she could at least mange a stalemate.

When she drew closer he looked back to the receipts, splitting them into two piles. "Here." He pushed one of the stacks towards her. "You do those, and I'll do these, and we'll swap."

She ignored the absurdity of this – that after all that had unfolded, he'd decided the best thing for them to do next was to sit around adding up receipts – and chose to embrace the monotony of the task. It was soothing, a kind of reprieve from having to feel anything, at least for a few minutes. They worked in silence, only the sound of scratching pens. She finished with her totals first, and a moment later they traded piles.

"You made a mistake," Sam said. His expression was mostly stoic but she saw something triumphant in how the corners of his lips were twitching.

"Where?"

"Right here." He pointed out the error, adding coldly, "I guess math wasn't one of your twenty-seven majors, huh?"

She pursed her lips and returned to her own pile, scanning the numbers determinedly. "You made one too."

"I did not."

"Yes, you did." She showed him; he craned his neck to see, looking irritated.

"Well, you made two mistakes."

"Where's the second?" She reached for the pile but he jerked it out of reach.

"I haven't found it yet," he mumbled.

As it turned out there was no second mistake, which allowed him to take an inordinate amount of time looking for it. After five minutes she started to fidget on the stool, wishing – what? That something would happen? She wasn't sure she really wanted anything to happen, but the quiet was making her restless and ill-at-ease. "Sam," she said finally, "I really don't think there's—"

"Damn!" he said. "Didn't I tell you to shut up? Now I have to start over."

"Sam, I didn't…" He cast her a venomous look and she trailed off; with his attention momentarily diverted she dove for the pile of receipts and this time succeeded, though not for long. She felt a quick surge of triumph, but it dwindled a moment later when she realized there wasn't actually anything for her to _do_ with them. Then something base and instinctive told her to run, which – had she any time to dwell on it – she might have found somewhat remarkable, because her mind had not anticipated that he would immediately fling himself over the bar and barrel after her. Her body knew – how on earth did it know that? – but she obliged her mind instead and within a second he had a death grip on her arm and she was struggling to get away.

"Give them back!"

"Let me _go_!" She waved her free arm blindly and felt her elbow connect with skin, but this only seemed to incite him further. "You're acting like a child," she hissed.

"_You're_ acting like a child." He tried to grab her other wrist, the one with the receipts, and she dodged him – flinging the pile as hard as she could. Being made of paper they did not travel far, drifting rather placidly to their feet, but he did not seem to notice, or else had lost interest in them altogether. When he grabbed her hair (her _hair_! Were they in fourth grade?) she kicked wildly – and suddenly she felt his hand slacken on her arm, saw him slump to the ground.

"Oh _Christ,_" he wailed.

She almost laughed, mostly because it was so unexpected; then she remembered Dan, the toned instructor of her "Practical Feminism" course, and realized what she'd done. "A lot of women," he'd told them, "don't think they'll ever stand a chance against a male attacker. That's a myth – there are always weak spots. The eyes… the knees… But especially the _groin_. Go for that first. The bastard won't know what hit him."

Sam was now curled up in some sort of fetal position, his eyes screwed shut and his hands curled into fists. "Oh god, you _bitch…_ You're crazy. Do you know that? You're _crazy._"

"Sam…" She heard a trace of amusement in her voice and hoped he hadn't; she knelt at his side, trying to discern how badly she'd hurt him. "Are you…"

She meant to finish the question with "okay" – "Are you okay?" – but instead burst out laughing, without being able to stop herself. He opened one eye and looked at her with a mixture of contempt and self-pity. "Oh, I'm _sorry_," she said, once she'd finally calmed herself down. "I didn't mean to do _that_, but you really can't say you weren't—"

"Asking for it," he finished, sounding completely miserable. She laughed again, pressing a palm to her face.

"You pulled my _hair_."

"Whatever I did," he mumbled, "I think we're even now."

"Can you sit up?" She touched his arm and his other eye opened; now the disdain had left him and he seemed more helpless, sort of baffled and awed at once, a deer in the headlights. Awkwardly he righted himself, leaning back against the base of the bar.

"I'm really sorry," she said again.

"Then why are you still laughing?"

She gathered the receipts from the floor and passed them to him. "Here. You can keep looking for the mistake, if you want."

He glanced at them for a second but did not seem to devote any real attention to the task; he then crumpled them into a ball and lobbed them across the bar. "I'm not very good at this," he said in a low voice.

"Well…" She couldn't come up with anything to say, so settled on something stupid. "Math is hard."

"It's really hard," he muttered, his teeth gritted. It occurred to her that perhaps he was not really talking about math anymore. "But… but I try."

"That's, uh… That's all that counts." She paused. "No pun intended."

"It doesn't count for shit." He tilted his head back, staring dolefully at the ceiling. "I think I flunked every math class I ever took."

"Me too."

"What?" He looked at her abruptly. "_You_?"

"Well, not all of them. It was just one."

"You _flunked_ a class?"

"I didn't exactly flunk."

"What'd you do, then?"

She could not tell if the embarrassment she felt stemmed from the memory of the class, or because she had – unintentionally – misled him. The word "flunk", she now remembered, had different connotations for straight-A students than the rest of the world. "I got a B," she mumbled.

"Oh god." He tried to cast her another scathing look but it didn't really work this time, because he was fighting not to smile. "You're a nutcase."

"Well," she said, a little defensively, trying to preserve the event as a genuine trauma, "it wasn't even a B+."

"God, who knew? Here we all thought you had no skeletons in your closet, but it turns out you were practically delinquent."

"I wouldn't say I have no skeletons in my closet..."

He considered this, breathing steadily; he seemed to be recovering from the blow. Their eyes met and she found something strange in his, an emotion she could not quite pinpoint. "I guess everyone does," he said softly.


	2. Chapter 2

_Update: It wasn't sushi at all! It was fish over quinoa, because THAT'S THE SAME THING. Not that I'm complaining because I would have had Captain Crunch otherwise. It was actually pretty good. For those of you who didn't grow up in a culture where people would eat dirt if you told them it was organic, quinoa is some kind of grain._

_Anyway..._

It was a bizarre expression, wasn't it – "skeletons in the closet"? If you killed someone and lacked the imagination to do anything but shove their body in your closet, it didn't seem like you'd evade notice long enough for the thing to turn to bone. Didn't that stuff stink? Secrets weren't like that, or at least, she didn't think theirs were.

"What are yours?" she murmured. She hadn't known she was going to ask this, but there it was; how much of what she did, she wondered, was even under her control? She glanced at him nervously.

"My what?"

"You know… Skeletons."

He blinked. "You know what they are."

"Those don't count."

"Why not?"

"Because everyone knows about them." And a thought struck her – did she know _anything_ about him that everyone else didn't know too? He definitely lied to her a lot, but that didn't bother her as much as maybe it should have, because she always knew_._ When he lied to her face she took it as a challenge and sometimes even found a twisted kind of pleasure in making him jump through a million hoops until finally, flustered and exhausted, he would fess up. Fessing up did not mean telling the truth – because she didn't think he really knew how to do that – but merely admitting to the lie and gaping at her like some kind of stupid goldfish who'd just noticed a big crack on the wall of his tank. It made her feel a fucked-up intimacy between them, a reminder that in some cases she knew him better than he knew himself, but it occurred to her now that she didn't know much about him at all. It seemed that, as far as he was concerned, he'd sprung out of the earth fully grown, closed both ends of a double-header in Baltimore, bought a bar, and that was about it.

"What're yours?" he said.

"I told you."

"What, that you got a B in a math class?" She winced just slightly at hearing this aloud and he snorted. "That's not a skeleton, Diane, that's…"

"What?"

"I dunno, I couldn't come up with what's the opposite of a skeleton. I mean, I could, but it doesn't really work."

"It's… it's a strange idiom, isn't it?" She paused, considering what her other skeletons might be, then felt a prickle of annoyance when she realized he'd managed to steer the conversation away from himself again. How did he always do that? "You have to tell me one," she said.

He smirked. "I don't have to do anything."

"I told you—"

"Yours doesn't count!"

"I've told you a lot," she finished stiffly. "About… about my parents and childhood and—"

"Yeah, I could write a biography."

"Oh…" She glared at him. "You're _impossible._"

"And you keep trying anyway."

She looked up sharply, thinking at first that it was a barb, but didn't find much fight in him this time. He looked sheepish, guilty even, and was staring at his shoes. Maybe "skeletons in the closet" was a good metaphor after all, if you took a step back from logic. Corpses stunk but skeletons, like secrets, could be concealed – from everyone else. Meanwhile you might go about your life quite normally, except for the gnawing awareness that you had something terrible tucked away. When she watched him she could tell that whatever the skeletons were, he had only succeeded in hiding them, not escaping them.

"I just don't understand," she said, finding it suddenly hard to get the words out, "why you want us to be _strangers_."

"Strangers?" He seemed taken aback by this – maybe even hurt? She couldn't tell for sure. "We're not… How are we strangers? Everyone has secrets. You…" He hesitated, seeming to deliberate over whether or not he should continue. "Look, sweetheart, I know you like to talk a lot, but you haven't told me anything, uh… that you didn't want to say."

Involuntarily she shuddered, because she realized what her skeleton was – could she call it a skeleton? It wasn't dead. She hadn't told him that she loved him. But why should she? To do that would be to give up and let the quicksand swallow her whole. He wouldn't say it back, though a small part of her still clung to the stupid notion that he might. On a few occasions she had felt almost sure he loved her too, but more often – and especially of late – she'd begun to doubt that he was capable of such depth of emotion at all.

And he had to _know_, right? There was another reason why it wasn't a skeleton: it was painfully apparent to her, in almost everything she did. For starters, over an hour has passed since their "breakup" and she was still sitting in that stupid bar. But then again… he was too, wasn't he?

Still, she wouldn't tell him, unless maybe he told her first, which he was definitely not going to do. So instead she said, "I _hate_ triangles."

"_What_?" He snorted, looking at her curiously. "Is that s'pposed to be a secret?"

"Yes, it's the same secret. It was trigonometry. You haven't taken it, have you?"

He shook his head.

"Never do. I still don't believe it's real. Most math is like… I don't know, a logic puzzle, I suppose. It's really not so bad, but those _triangles…_" She trailed off and he laughed.

"What a trauma."

"It was a trauma! It… it doesn't make _sense_, there're no… I mean, I think it was just arbitrary rules that someone made up. That's how it seemed, at least. I'd never... I'd never done anything I couldn't figure out just by thinking about it rationally." She paused. "It made me cry."

"Yeah, I bet it did. How old were you?"

"Sixteen. What do you mean, you bet it did?"

He shrugged. "I guess I just sorta envisioned you crying through your whole adolescence."

To an extent this was true - if not rather hyperbolic - but his perceiving it surprised her, even though she sensed he was partly joking. "Why?"

"Why else? 'Cos you hadn't met me yet."

This, she knew, was also intended as a half-joke, but the circumstances caused it to fall flat. Hadn't they just…broken up, or something? She wasn't really sure what was going on. Glancing at the clock on the wall, she saw it was almost four in the morning.

An uncomfortable silence fell over them and she noticed he was staring at her, so intently she could not bring herself to meet his eyes. But even when she looked away she could _feel_ his gaze, almost as if he were physically touching her. "Sam," she began in a low voice, not knowing what she planned to say.

He gave an odd jolt, as if returning to himself after some time away, and cut her off by saying, "Hey, you wanna know something funny? My math teacher was a pedophile."

"_What_?" She laughed, but not because it was very funny – it had just surprised her. Then she hoped it wasn't true, because if it was, it definitely wasn't funny. "When?"

"Seventh grade." He chuckled to himself, as if this were something he remembered fondly. "Maybe he wasn't really a pedophile. We just said he was. But that's why—"

"You failed math?"

"No, I failed math because I'm stupid. I was gonna say that's why I liked seventh grade so much."

"Because your teacher was a pedophile?!"

"It was really _funny_, Diane. And what did I care? He didn't like boys. His name was Mr. Bender. We used to say, uh, 'Mr. Bender likes to make the girls bend.'" His eyes fell shut and he cackled.

"But _you_ didn't," she said, "right?" Afterwards she was not sure why she'd asked this, as if she wanted reassurance that he'd been a _nice_ twelve-year-old. When she thought about it for a second, it seemed very unlikely that he'd been a nice twelve-year-old.

"I made it up," he said, confirming her hunch. "You don't think it's funny?"

"To the contrary, I think it's terribly cruel!"

"I used to tell girls I'd protect them from him. Oh god." He sounded simultaneously amused and dejected. "Why do you want me to tell you stuff about me? It's almost all worse than this."

"Why did you think he was a pedophile?"

"I dunno, 'cos he was old and kind of seedy looking. And he wasn't married."

"How old was he?"

"I guess… around my age," he said, sounding a little alarmed at this realization. "But maybe he was a pedophile. He got fired the next year. Maybe I'm a hero."

"Or maybe he got fired because you started a ridiculous rumor about him!" She paused. "And you made it _catchy_. The poor thing. He never stood a chance."

"Hey, can I help it if I have a way with words?"

"Oh, you _ass_." But she couldn't keep herself from smiling, and he returned it nervously.

"Poets are never understood in their own times."

"Right," she said, rolling her eyes.

"He could have been a pedophile."

"It seems a whole lot more likely that he wasn't!"

"Well," he said, "that's a very Diane thing to say."

"That most people aren't pedophiles?"

"No, I mean…" He coughed. "Just how you're, uh, always looking for the good in everyone."

"Oh." She glanced at him, noticing that the humor had left his voice. "Thank you," she said awkwardly.

"Even when they've done almost nothing to deserve it," he finished in a mumble.

She felt herself tense. "Well, I think everyone… deserves a chance."

"No." He shook his head. "You're wrong."

"Sam—"

"You know what?" he interrupted. Though she knew he was speaking to her, he seemed to be addressing the floor, and in the dim light she almost swore he was reddening. "I think when you… leave here, I'm probably gonna worry about you every day for the rest of my life."

She wanted to say _Really?_ just so he might repeat himself a few times. She wanted to tell him that she had no intention of leaving if he really didn't want her to and did he _really_ not want her to, and did he…? But none of it could be said. She drew her knees to her chest and stared vacantly ahead, feeling once again defeated. "Why?" she said finally.

"'Cos you trust _everyone_, and I just… Remember Andy Andy?" She inhaled sharply and he clumsily patted her on the back. "Sorry, I mean… of course you do. I just wonder about who's gonna…" He trailed off, biting his lip. "You trust everyone," he repeated, in conclusion. She looked up at him and thought she might start to cry.

"But I don't trust you," she murmured.

He smiled faintly but looked nonetheless troubled. "Good," he said. "You're smart." Now he patted her head, as if to indicate where her brain was. "Maybe you'll be okay."

His hand was still resting on her hair, which was somewhat distracting – a nice distraction, because she didn't really like where the conversation was going. "I hope you're not thinking of pulling it again," she said, smirking at him.

"Naw." He mussed it a little, and then a distant look came across his face, as if he were contemplating something too vast for him to fully understand and becoming frustrated by it. Triangles, perhaps. "Unless you'd like that," he added in a low voice.

She froze. She was not looking at him but once again felt him watching her. "Maybe…maybe just a little bit," she whispered.

She felt a terrible yank and let out a yelp of pain, but he'd only done it to draw her closer, and his hands became mostly gentle as they kissed. Still, there was something unsettling about the way he was holding her – the word "violent" came to mind, but she knew that was wrong. Maybe he'd always gripped her this tightly and she'd just never noticed, but now she could not help seeing some quality of a struggle in it. He never once released her from his grasp; he seemed convinced that if he did, she would be gone.

He clambered to his feet, dragging her after him in the direction of the door. "Where're we going?"

"Your place, it's closer."

But time did not seem to be a concern, because once in the stairwell he pinned her to the wall and resumed kissing her. The sun had not yet risen but the blank, starless sky was beginning to lighten and outside she could see him more clearly. She did not know how long they stood there; she supposed it didn't matter very much.

Well, this was sure getting to be a weird breakup!

She could see no possible way for them to be broken up, but sensed that something was wrong. It occurred to her that they hadn't _resolved_ anything – that everything they'd been fighting about was still true, and that she still didn't trust him. And he still wouldn't _say it_, the one thing he could say that might make everything else irrelevant. Was it possible that it couldn't be said – or didn't _need_ to be said?

Ordinarily she would dispute that, but in the moment she willed her mind to shut off. They sprinted up the steps, the gray light of early morning beginning to illuminate the empty street, and she felt herself enter into one of those rare states in which she did not need to be told anything. She already knew.

_Perhaps the roses really want to grow,_

_The vision seriously intends to stay;_

_If I could tell you I would let you know._

_Suppose the lions all get up and go,_

_And all the brooks and soldiers run away;_

_Will Time say nothing but I told you so?_

_If I could tell you I would let you know._


End file.
